Writer of crime novels, born in London, UK. He served in the army in South Africa, where he later (1899) became a journalist, and in 1905 published his first success, the adventure story The Four Just Men. He wrote over 170 novels and plays, and is best remembered for his crime novels, such as The Clue of the Twisted Candle. He later became a film scriptwriter. His autobiography, People, appeared in 1926.
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (April 1, 1875–February 10, 1932) was a prolific British crime writer, journalist and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and countless articles in newspapers and journals.
Parents and Birth
Edgar Wallace was born in Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, London, on the dubiously auspicious natal day of 1st April 1875. His biological parents were theatre actors Richard Horatio Edgar (who never knew of his existence) and Mary Jane "Polly" Richards, nee Blair, an extraordinary woman of great personal integrity and moral courage.
Born Mary Jane Blair in 1843, Liverpool, to an Irish Catholic immigrant family, Mary's family had been in showbusiness for some years, and she grew up to be a theatrical "Jane of All Trades" - stagehand, usherette, bit-part actress. Also born in Liverpool in 1838, Captain Joseph Richards of the Merchant Navy was likewise from and Irish Catholic immigrant family - his father John Richards was also a Merchant Navy Captain, and his mother Catherine Richards came from a mariner family.
Taking the stage name "Polly" Richards, Mary took up theatre work again to support herself and her daughter. In 1872, Polly met and joined the Marriott family theatre troupe, becoming part of the "family" due to the great affection that developed between her and the Marriott women - the troupe was run by Mrs Alice Marriott and her husband and their three adult children, Grace, Adeline and Richard.
In July 1874, the Marriott troupe experienced its greatest commercial success ever and so a "come one come all" back-stage party was held at which everyone drank "not wisely but too well".
With the personal integrity and moral courage that was quintessential to her, Polly acted decisively. In the autumn of 1874, she invented a fictitious obligation in Greenwich that would last at least half a year, and obtained a room in a boarding house where she lived off her meagre savings through until Edgar's birth on 1st April 1875. On 9th April 1875, Polly took Edgar to the Freeman family and made arrangements to visit as often as she was able without eliciting interest/suspicion by the Marriotts, since by the time she returned to London in April 1875 Jenny Taylor and Richard Marriott, oblivious to the existence of his son, had been married a month.
Childhood and Early Career
Known as the prosaic Dick Freeman, Edgar had a happy childhood, forming an especially close bond with 20-year-old Clara Freeman who became like a second mother to him. His foster-father George Freeman was an honourable and kind man and determined to ensure Dick got a good education, perhaps the family being influenced by the tragic romanticism of Edgar's birth circumstances.
But by 1878, Polly was faced with a serious dilemma. After their marriage, Richard and Jenny had relocated to Scotland, where their children were born, including Edgar's namesake paternal half-brother, Edgar Marriott (1880-1951), who was renowned under his stage name of Marriott Edgar as a poet, comedian, and scriptwriter for Stanley Holloway, for whom he wrote the famous Holloway Monologues, including The Lion & In short, she could no longer afford even the small sum she had been paying the Freemans to care for Edgar.
Arriving with the news and a distraught offer to place Edgar in a workhouse, Polly found the Freemans fiercely opposed to any such action, doting on the boy. Her actions led to tragic consequences for her and Edgar decades later.
Edgar had inherited his father's swarthy handsomeness, his paternal grandmother's ambition and his mother's intelligence, plus a healthy dollop of theatrical extrovertness from both sides. Unaware that the half-sister he did not know existed had just died, Edgar enlisted in the Infantry preparatory to leaving for South Africa.
In 1885 when she was sixteen, Josephine Catherine Richards had become engaged to William Henry Donovan, and Polly felt honour-bound to inform her of the half-brother living in Deptford. With an eye on the Marriott family's welfare, Josephine agreed the secret must not be revealed and apparently felt it too dangerous to engineer a meeting between her and Edgar.
At the time, Edgar was finding Army life lacking considerably.
Marriage, Initial Success, Return to UK 1898-1902
With Edith Anstree out of sight and out of mind, he met one of his avid readers, a girl of similar age, Ivy Maude Caldecott, whose father was a Methodist minister, Reverend William Shaw Caldecott. So, when Ivy defied the paternal diktat and married Edgar Wallace, Marion sided with her daughter.
In 1900, Ivy had their first child, Eleanor Clare Hellier Wallace, and Edgar met one Harry F. With Cohen's complicity, Edgar came up with an ingenious way of scooping the press-hating General Kitchener in 1902 with the signing of the Treaty ending the Boer War (for details see The Mind of Edgar Wallace by C D Stewart at "The Cat's Whiskers" http://www.cd.stewart.btinternet.co.uk). Edgar had it made, but it was all about to go horribly wrong.
Edgar had always had self-confidence, determination and the ability to spot and seize opportunities; Unfortunately, his trouncing of Kitchener and Ivy's naively untempered admiration inflated Edgar's ego to the point where he considered his opinion infallible. Since Cohen was of a different political view, this led to increasingly heated arguments that Edgar was too egotistical to realise Cohen, as the paper's owner and financier, was predestined to win. Provoked to wrath, Cohen finally fired Edgar in 1902, when he had been in the job barely 9 months.
As Edgar reeled from the shock, he and Ivy were devastated when 2-year-old Eleanor died of meningitis, going from healthy to dead in less than 24-hours. Edgar's response to any crisis was to flee, and though as grief-stricken as Ivy, he was also unemployed and in serious debt. Deeply superstitious, Edgar viewed any "economising" as a sign his luck was about to desert him, and thus had been living way beyond even a £2,000 per annum salary since the first day of his employment. Eleanor's death triggered in Ivy an irraitonal but profound loathing of Johannesburg, so Edgar promptly sold their house and whisked them aboard a liner for England whilst keeping Ivy completely unaware of their financial situation. When they arrived, Edgar had 12 shillings in his pockets.
His one prudence since the mid 1890s had been to "keep in" with his colleagues at the Daily Mail and so he presented himself at their office with the tale of his daughter's death and his wife's fragile health. The newspaper's new proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, promptly hired Edgar as a sub-editor. Despite the annual wage being only £750, Edgar promptly took Ivy and began living way beyond his means. She had no idea of what was going on and Edgar "escaped" his South African creditors by burning their increasingly vicious letters.
The Four Just Men, Career As Thriller Writer, 1903-1920
In 1903, Edgar experienced another profound event, when his mother Polly came to him. She had been following her son's illustrious career as a Colonial correspondent since the late 1890s and like Ivy and everyone around Edgar, had no idea he was really penniless. Still grieving for Eleanor and in total denial over his finances, Edgar reacted with uncharacteristic harshness, giving her a few pounds and turning her away. When Ivy, out at the time, returned home and Edgar, already regretting his actions, related what had happened, Ivy chastised him for his harshness and pointed out that he had not given Polly any chance to explain. Usually a generous and "benefit of the doubt" type person, Edgar agreed he had been hasty and, unaware his mother was already dead, decided that as soon as he had "a bit of time", he would track his mother down and get her side of things.
The first distracting event was Ivy's second pregnancy in 1904, to which she reacted with no joy but anxiety and stress; Edgar found escape from the tension by going to Europe as a correspondent during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War.
Upon returning, he was able to briefly meet his healthy baby son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, before Ivy left with Bryan for South Africa, where her ill mother Marion Caldecott, mistakenly believing she was terminally ill, had expressed a wistful desire to see her grandson. This meant Ivy was not present to restrain Edgar's enthusiastic excess. Writing the story of the FJM who would kill the Foreign Secretary if he tried to ratify an unjust law, Edgar had to form his own publishing company, Tallis, to print it. The competition would be a runaway success because Edgar intended to advertise the book on a scale unprecedented not just in Britain but across the Empire.
He approached Harmsworth for the loan of the £1,000 and was promptly refused. Edgar wasn't really suited to editorship as he preferred to spend his afternoons at the racecourse or poker table; Harmsworth in turn was irriated by the fact that Edgar was so difficult to get hold of instead of being on the other end of the phone awaiting "his master's voice" like the other editors. Completely unfazed, Edgar pressed ahead - his alarmed workmates at the Mail prevailed upon him to lower the prize money to £500: a £250 first prize, £200 second prize and £50 third prize, but were unable to restrain him in the privacy of his home. Edgar took out adverts on buses, hoardings, flyers, and so forth, running up an incredible bill of £2,000. Though he knew he needed the book to sell sufficient copies to make £2,501 before he saw any profit, Edgar was confidently aware this would be achieved in the first three months of the book going on sale, totally unaware he was hopelessly underestimating things.
Forging ahead with enthusiasm but no real idea what he was doing, Edgar had also made a far more serious error. Only after the competition had closed and the correct solution printed as part of the final chapter denouement did Edgar learn that he was legally obligated to pay every person who answered correctly the full prize amount in that category; Additionally, though his advertising gimmick had worked as the FJM novel was a bestseller, Edgar discovered that instead of his woefully over-optimistic 3 months, FJM would have to continue selling consistently with no margin of error for 2 full years to recoup the £2,500 he had mistakenly believed he needed to break even.
Edgar's answer was to simply ignore the situation, but circumstances were coming together ominously.
As 1905 became 1906 and headed for 1907 without any list of prize winners being run, more and more suspicions were being voiced about the honesty of the competition. Friction already existed between the autocratic Harmsworth and his elusive editor, and Harmsworth, having refused the initial £1,000 loan was furious at having to now loan Edgar over £5,000 to protect the paper's reputation because Edgar couldn't pay. Harmsworth's irritation simmered as instead of appropriate gratitude and contrition, Edgar bounced back full of ebullience and confidence, and also seemed in no hurry to pay back the loan.
The straws that broke Harmsworth's back were two libel suits between 1906-1907. In the latter year, Edgar did his usual flight response by absconding to the Belgian Congo, ostensibly to report on how the native Congolese were being abused by representatives of King Leopold. In 1907 Ivy was again pregnant, but Bryan was 2, the age Eleanor died, making her anxious and stressed again, and two libel suits against the Daily Mail involving Edgar were boiling in the courts.
Part of the case hinged on an article in which Edgar had grossly inflated the figures by quoting an "unnamed washerwoman" he'd invented off the top of his head, as he was hopeless with money and had no idea of fiscal prudence.
Unlike in 1902, in 1908 there was no way to hide the calamity from Ivy, emotionally vulnerable from having the couple's third child Patricia Marion Caldecott Wallace, and in short order they had to move to a virtual slum as Edgar stared penury in the face. Ivy and Edgar had never been truly compatible with each other in personality anyway, and 1908 marked the start of the slow disintegration of their marriage. But again, Edgar found opportunity in the shape Mrs Isabel Thorne, who edited a minor magazine; she initially approached him about "romance" serials but he admitted he was no good at such - his teenage handsomeness and early marriage to Ivy meant he had no real experience of the whole Romeo and Juliet type of thing. She therefore deserves the credit for Edgar Wallace, thriller novelist extraordinaire.
She hired him to write a serial for her magazine, and so was born Sanders of the River in 1909, which ran for years and which he eventually compiled into novels.
As shown in the listing of Wallace's output featured below, the two ten year periods from 1908-1918 and 1922-1932 were the most prolific of his life, but for different reasons. Edgar sold the rights to his novels barely the ink had dried on the page - FJM for £75, its sequel for £80, and so forth - merely to stave off creditors and put meagre food on the table and give token amounts to his creditors, many of which were from South Africa. Through Grace, Edgar learned of his father and mother, his maternal half-sister and the paternal semi-siblings of whom he would only ever meet one, Edgar Marriott. Edgar Wallace could not cope with emotional trauma at all, and his conscience excoriated him as he recalled his treatment of his mother, who had then left and promptly died.
As his personal stress increased, his writing output became amazing; Edgar was one of those people who did best with the least time to "think" and this was an asset for his writing, though it must be admitted that most of what he wrote was adequate rather than excellent.
Edgar's meeting of minds soon fizzled out, as did his minor flirtation with Mrs Edith Cockle, nee Anstree, his first fiancee, who was far more sensible and mature than Edgar had ever been. Spurred by guilt over his actions, Edgar was motivated to "woo" Ivy with sufficient success for her to fall unexpectedly pregnant in 1915, though the marriage had been moribund for several years. However, at this time Edgar took on a new secretary, a timid, quiet 15-year-old girl named Violet King. Whereas Ivy had tolerated Violet's predecessors with relief, she was far more perceptive and even intelligent than Edgar, and immediately saw Violet was her successor. Although Edgar was romantically "clueless" in the way that some people (women as well as men) are to the ideal mate underneath their nose, Ivy knew that as Violet matured from girl to woman she would be far more ideally suited to Edgar's temperament than Ivy had ever been. Ivy also knew that when Edgar inevitably fell into literal adultery with Violet, he would flagellate himself over his betrayal of Ivy.
In 1916, Ivy had her last child, named Michael Blair Wallace by Edgar in belated homage to his mother, Polly. Assuring herself that Violet liked and was liked by her children, and aware they would all be at school shortly, Ivy showed consideration and kindness towards Edgar to the bitter end, gently withdrawing from his life before filing for divorce in 1918 and lying like a rug to assure him that he was in no way to blame (he was entirely at fault). There was also her own personal discomfort as the inescapable reality was that Violet was the same age as Edgar and Ivy's eldest daughter Eleanor, and what she could have been had she lived - that constant reminder of dreams forever lost - upset Ivy more than anything. Success, 1918-1929
With Ivy living in Tunbridge Wells and the children at school, Edgar could finally concentrate on his writing and from 1918 drew closer to the intelligent, ever more capable Violet. He finally "caught the clue bus" that Ivy had several years earlier and Violet King became his second wife in 1921. Shrewd, practical and sensible, Violet had no intention of disrupting her and Edgar's life much and so was shocked and upset to fall pregnant, having her only child, Penelope Wallace, in 1923, though Edgar was delighted.
This gradually spurred his second ten-year writing boom, this time because of personal confidence, rather than stress. It became a standing joke that if someone called Edgar on the phone and was told he was writing a novel, they would promptly reply, "I'll wait!" He also invented and patented the Edgar Wallace Plot Wheel.
It is said that Wallace was the first British crime novelist to use policemen rather than brilliant amateur sleuths as most other writers of the time did.
At the beginning of this period of increased output, Edgar experienced one more terrible emotional shock, with the death of Ivy Wallace. Experiencing ill-health, she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1923, and wrote a letter to Edgar requesting a loan for minor surgery with such successful obfuscation Edgar had no idea she was seriously ill. Aware even in extremis that Edgar was incapable of coping with emotional trauma and with heroic compassion considering his new wife and toddler daughter's situation, Ivy again wrote for a loan and downplayed her condition so well Edgar believed she had a minor chest infection. The frantic summons of a doctor got Bryan to her deathbed so she did not die alone like Polly Richards, but she succumbed to breast cancer in 1926, leaving Edgar utterly shell-shocked.
The most bitter irony was that only months after Ivy's death, he finally achieved the tremendous fame and fortune that her hard work and loyalty had largely made possible. Ivy had been his staunchest supporter and loyal helpmeet, being a de facto single parent and working unnoticed in the background like the make-up artist who never gets the credit he or she is due for the movie star's fabulous face. Even after her love was killed by his emotional weakness and intransigence and she divorced him, Ivy kindly never stopped encouraging him - and Violet - to believe in his future success. Now Violet would reap the rewards Ivy had worked for, though doubtless Ivy, with her typical generosity of nature, would never have begrudged Violet a penny.
As well being a prolific novelist, Edgar was also a noted playwright, in fact rather better at plays than novels, truth be told.
User Comments Add a comment…